Our Urban Town a Publication of the Staten Island Urban CenterOur Urban Town is a quarterly publication that shares thought provoking, intellectually provocative, community news, ideas and opinions from Staten Island's urban neighborhoods.

#reSIStah issue​in celebration of women's history month

​the Woke reSIStah Issue Our Urban Town publishes thought provoking ideas, intellectually provocative reflections, community news, and opinions from the very people in the community who passionately live and/or work with these issues. In this Woke ReSistah Issue, Our Urban Town shares the writings of women activists on Staten Island as a tribute to the contributions of women right now in this borough. Due to space constraints, these are just a small sample of women activists doing the work on the island, but our hope is that these writings inspire readers to be or continue to be activists, to share real stories, advocate for real solutions and to fight for real for the things they believe in. In the era of WOKE and RESIST, it’s our time to be activists everywhere we go and in everything we do.Kelly Vilar,​Editor of Our Urban Town & ​CEO of Staten Island Urban Center

Lorie Honor - Teacher, Business Owner, Community Activist, Feminist, Marcher and Founder of Staten Island Women Who March

​Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

For people of a certain age, this sentence was noteworthy as a typing exercise, typed over and over to familiarize a student like me, then a 7th grader at Egbert Jr. High School, for what was likely prepping young women all over the country for our unexpected entry level careers. 10 years later, after working in retail and restaurants throughout high school and every summer in college, when I graduated with a BS in communicative disorders and with a strong liberal arts background looking for my first real job, I was shocked to find myself in front of my old frenemy, the typewriter.

I had shown up at the appointment at an employment agency that a friend of a friend of my mother arranged for me. “Can you type?” she asked. “No. Why?” I had no aspirations to be a secretary. And despite writing term papers over the last 4 years, I was not a particularly gifted typist. But type I must. So I typed. Badly. I was also given a steno test. And a basic addition and subtraction test, to find out if I were a candidate to be a bank teller.

Now, I was no snob in the job department, having worked since the age of 14 as a cashier in clothing stores and as a waitress, but when I looked across the room I saw the young men my age were waiting for their interviews without a typewriter in sight. “Can they type?” I asked. Why weren't they brought into the small room to “clack, clack, clack, ding” along with me? Where were their small pads and number two pencils in which to, “take a memo?” The friend of the friend of my mother's looked uncomfortable. Not because she understood my outrage over the inequity, but because I was being a pain in the ass. “I don't know if they can type”, she said. The office had gotten very quiet and the employment agent was looking at me like a 2 year-old pitching a fit in church. “But why not? I mean, why don't you know? If entry level jobs require typing and you're making me type and I don't type. Why don't they have to type?” I was making her, and now the whole office, including the boys waiting for the man jobs, uncomfortable by asking what seemed to me an obvious question.

It was an obvious question that everyone in that office except me knew the answer to. The boys were interviewing for entry level jobs somewhere that would likely eventually come with a girl of his own to type, take down his every word, bring him coffee and give him something to look at as she left his office. Welp, it wasn't going to be this girl. I could feel their relief to see a particular recent college grad hit the streets.